“Every story you ever see about Amazon, it has that sentence: ‘An Amazon spokesman declined to comment,’ “ Mr. Marcus said.

Drew Herdener, an Amazon spokesman, declined to comment.

My colleagues and I have written about Amazon a lot over the years. I have friends at other publications who also cover Amazon. The story is always the same. It's incredibly rare to get a comment from the company on a story, even if the news is very positive or controversial, and the only time we really hear from the company on the record is when it issues a press release.

So, yes, this sounds a lot like inside tech journalism baseball, but it really does highlight the intense secrecy Bezos requires Amazon employees to maintain. You always hear about Apple's secrecy, but even its PR team will give a comment to the press if a story is important enough.

Amazon is on a whole other level.

Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through his
personal investment company Bezos Expeditions.